I mentioned on my twitter feed (@bojnberry. If you aren’t following me there, well, what the heck are you waiting for?!) that I was taking in part in Story a Day May last month. The goal of SaDM is obvious: write and complete a short story every single freaking day of the month. It was hard. Counting-micro-potholes-on-a-cycling-path hard. (um, that’s a joke for Boj, the rest of you may ignore that last sentence (at your peril!)). Hard enough that I didn’t manage it ever night, but I persevered, wrote, collapsed in front of the keyboard a few nights, and wrote some more. I learned about this through Michael Haynes, so a massive hat-tip to him.
I wrote every day (because that’s what I’m doing right now if you didn’t know, 345 days and counting, suckas!), and managed to finish 18 stories, 3 times as many as I wrote in the 8 months leading up to the challenge. Pumped, I am. Of course I also have fragments of 13 other stories which I didn’t manage to finish thanks to time constraints, or to too much intake of bourbon or bbq or whatnot that day, or I was “just not feeling it”. Needless to say, that last excuse is by far the lamest.
This was a great experience for me. It really helped me to focus on deadlines (and enjoy, 13 times, the wooshing sound they make as they fly by*) and work under pressure. I will be the first to say that a lot of what plopped out of my head was on the side of dreck, but there are a few quite serviceable pieces (and one helluva character) that made their way onto my digital page. I intend on prettying them up and sending them on the rounds in the next few weeks.
So. Thank you Julie Duffy for doing this, and thanks Michael for pointing me toward it. I had a blast!